In The News – 7-12-2013

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cynthia
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July 11, 2013 @ 8:11 AM
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HTC Ends Updates To HTC One S

The HTC One S phone may only be a little over a year old, but HTC has decided there won’t be any more Android updates to the phone. Users will stay at 4.1.1 Jelly Bean.

In a statement, the cmopany said. “We realize this news will be met with disappointment by some, but our customers should feel confident that we have designed the HTC One S to be optimized with our amazing camera and audio experiences.”

Bebo Founder Buys Back Company

How’s this for a nice deal? Bebo founder Michael Birch sold his social networking company to AOL in 2008 for $850 million. Now he’s just bought the company back for only $1 million. AOL never could quite figure out what to do with the site, which was a major player in social media before Facebook exploded. The CEO of AOL was fired only a year after spending all that cash on Bebo. AOL sold it for just $10 million to Criterion Capital and eventually went bankrupt in May 2013.

Now Birch has the company he started back and gets to keep his $849 million profit. He tweeted ““We just bought Bebo back for $1m. Can we actually re-invent it? Who knows, but it will be fun trying…”

Everything’s more fun when you have $849 million in profit in the bank.

Windows 8.1 Smart Search To Feature Bing Ads

Microsoft was proud to point out that the new Smart Search feature in Windows 8.1 would feature Bing results as well as results from your device. It turns out they’ll also be seeing ads. Thumbnail images of advertiser’s web pages will turn up in the search results.

“As we’ve said before, our goal is to make search advertising easier for our customers, while providing the best consumer experience with the most relevant results for the tasks they are looking to accomplish,” said David Pann, general manager of Microsoft’s Advertising Search Group.